


Dream Job

by Zeborah



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-02-08
Packaged: 2018-01-11 14:49:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1174364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeborah/pseuds/Zeborah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penelope has this fantasy. Not a sexual fantasy, though she has plenty of those too, involving J August Richards and Ben Browder and David Bowie, sometimes all at the same time. But <em>this</em> fantasy is a story she tells herself about how she joined the FBI. It goes like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream Job

**Author's Note:**

> (Because there are too many little things in that scene in S9ep12 that don't _quite_ match what we've been told before.)

_Penelope has this fantasy. Not a sexual fantasy, though she has plenty of those too, involving J August Richards and Ben Browder and David Bowie, sometimes all at the same time. But_ this _fantasy is a story she tells herself about how she joined the FBI. It goes like this:_

She's been handcuffed, driven in the back of a government car to the local FBI headquarters, and left for several hours attached to a table in a bare interrogation room. One wall is a one-way mirror, and a pair of cameras in the ceiling corners are pointed at her so she knows she's being watched from every angle. They're doing everything they can to intimidate her, but she's withstanding the pressure. She's the Black Queen and she has her warpaint on. She's strong, she's defiant, she's not going to give them anything.

And then this agent walks in, all slick and polish, and if this was Camelot his armour would be blinding. He calls her "Miss Garcia." She calls him "Suit" and "J Edgar", because she's a hacker and he's a fed and this is how she rolls.

And he's straight with her. He lays it all out, tells her they've caught her fair and square and now she's going to prison. She plays it cool, because she's rocking some tragic feels and there are worse things than going to prison. Like: selling your soul to the devil. But he keeps talking, about how she can join his team and help them catch the criminals. The real criminals; the Big Bads; the guys who prey on the weak and the vulnerable. She can help protect people from all the horrible things in the world.

And that's what convinces her. Not fear. Not desperation. And definitely not naïvété. She stays wary of him for every second, and even when she gives him her "résumé" it's a filepath that he won't be able to access unless he's telling the truth about having her offsite servers.

And then he calls in another agent to unlock her from the table. And wowza: that is some beefcake. That is premium eye candy, handcrafted by Willy Wonka himself. If music is the food of love, this guy can play her all night. She looks at him appreciatively and—

*

_Okay, so maybe it's a little bit of a sexual fantasy. She figures she's entitled._

_Or maybe she isn't. Maybe she deserves everything she got. Because what really happened was more like this:_

Penelope's asleep because it's seven in the morning and she's a hacker so she got to bed maybe two hours ago. The doorbell startles her awake. She blinks, in the morning blur, and it rings again. "Just a minute!" she calls, fumbling for her robe and glasses. She gets the robe on but drops the glasses somewhere between her bed and sidetable, and the doorbell rings _again_ so she gives up and stumbles myopically out to open it.

Two men in black are standing there. "Penelope Garcia?" says the one on the right.

Oh, frell.

"Agents Thomson and Reuters," says the one on the left. They both hold up blurry shiny things: Thomson's comes with a handful of folded papers. Her heart sinks even more. The FBI's got a search warrant and she's got a tatty bathrobe and bed hair and 20/80 visual acuity. "Going to let us in?" he prompts.

"Right," she says faintly, taking a stumbling step aside.

They bowl in past her, leaving her to shut the door and try to comb unruly hair with her fingers. While Thomson prowls around the edges of the room inspecting her photos and lampshades, Reuters makes straight for her laptop. "What's the password?"

"P-password? Sir?"

Thomson waves his papers at her again. "You _are_ going to cooperate with us, aren't you?"

"I—" She swallows. But all the incriminating stuff is on her offsite servers: every day she types in her connection details fresh, and she has a script that scrubs the laptop every time she steps out of the room. "BonsaiSloth. One word. Capital B and S."

"Is that a joke?" Thomson demands.

"What? No, sir! It's a—" He crosses the room to her in three strides, so close she can actually see what he looks like, square-jawed and hard-eyed. "It's not _my_ joke, it's just an internet thing from a few years ago because there was this student at MIT and he—"

"Penny, I'm not sure you're taking this seriously."

"Sir, I am, and actually my name's—"

"You realise you're in a lot of trouble."

"Yeah," Reuters adds absently, "this is all confirming everything we got from her offsite servers."

"What? How—"

Thomson tells her, "You're good, Penny, but we're better. We've been watching you a long time. We could have put you away last month after you hacked that cosmetics company, but what's the point of putting someone in prison if they're just going to get out again in five years?"

"Five _years_?"

"Did you know the PATRIOT Act makes cyberterrorism a Class B felony punishable by up to twenty years in prison?"

"But I'm not a terrorist!" she says desperately. Her breath hitches, and this is the moment she discovers that the only advantage of answering the door pre-makeup is not having to worry about tears streaking her mascara. Crying definitely doesn't do anything to improve her view of the room.

Unsympathetically Thomson tells Reuters. "Come on, let's book her and get that to the lab."

"Oh God," she says, choking on a hiccup. She covers her mouth with a hand and tries to stop crying, but it doesn't help. 

Reuters stands, shuts the laptop, and hesitates. She can't see his expression, but he murmurs to Thomson, "You know, it seems a waste."

"Yeah, well, she should have thought about that before she dropped out of school and became a criminal."

"I know, but look at her." The blur of his hand might indicate her sobbing, blubbering mess, her general state of mostly undress, her squint, or something else. What's she going to do in prison for twenty years? They don't let you access computers in prison. What's she going to do when she gets out in twenty years and she's a Flintstones girl in a Jetsons world? Reuters keeps going: "She's been cooperative. Maybe we can make some kind of deal."

"Like what? She confesses and we give her a job?"

"We've done it before."

"Yeah," Thomson says dismissively. "She's no Abagnale."

But it's a glimmer of hope, and Penelope leaps on it. She asks Reuters, "I wouldn't have to go to prison?"

And he's nice. He calls her Penelope. He hands her her box of tissues, helps her find her glasses, gives her some paper from her printer along with her pen with the troll baby bobblehead, and lets her sit down to write. Thomson paces impatiently by the door, but Reuters just stays with her and occasionally helps her out with the wording.

When she finishes it, Thomson isn't impressed. "She's holding out on us."

"I'm not!" she argues. She can breathe now, at least, but she's still feeling kind of overwhelmed. "I'm just under a little pressure here."

"It's a first draft," Reuters says reassuringly. "Why don't you get dressed, we'll pick up some breakfast on the way, and then we'll sit somewhere quiet and work on it some more. And talk about your new job."

*

Everything moves very quickly. The new job comes with a lot of conditions: she has to move to DC, which is fine, and there's a long list of people and groups and MMORPGs she's not allowed to associate with, which makes her balk. "But they're my friends!"

"You think they're going to visit you in prison?" Thomson retorts.

Thanks to glasses, clothes, coffee, and time for the shock to wear off, she dredges up the courage to say, "What evidence do you have against me exactly, anyway?"

"You mean other than your confession?"

Reuters puts in quickly while her mouth gapes open, "Penelope, I know it's a big change, but you'll make new friends. You're going to be working with a great team in the Cyber Division."

Her head is whirling. She can't think. She doesn't _want_ to think. She signs the agreement, and she moves to DC.

*

Day one is boring health and safety, like she doesn't know how to avoid RSI; and a patronising introduction to the system and file structure, like she doesn't know how to grep; and an insulting talk from the supervisory analyst about how being part of this team is a privilege and maybe she should wear something a little more _appropriate_ tomorrow. Finally she gets shown to her desk. It's one cubicle in an open office full of guys with questionable personal hygiene, and oh God, the powerpoint presentation printouts from this morning weren't joking: they're expecting her to actually _use_ Windows and Office software.

Day two she puts her hair up and wears a suit because fine, this is her life now. She's given a pile of traceroutes to run, and a convoluted set of instructions for doing it. She does it once to try and figure out why on God's green and verdant earth they're doing it that way, then settles in to write a script to do the same thing but with a bucketload less processing power and a tankerload less manual intervention. Windows doesn't make it easy on her. While she's wrestling with the command line's _unique_ syntax, the supervisory analyst comes around. "Hey, good work on— What are you doing?"

"Automating it."

"That's not going to work: it's a manual process." Over her objection he shakes his head. "Just do it like you did the first one." Further attempts at explaining that it's only a manual process because it's a _bad_ process just annoy him, so she gives up and does it like she did the first one. She's the new girl; she has to put in her time.

Day three she has another goddamn pile of traceroutes and it's getting ridiculous. So she spends five minutes typing up the script that's been kicking at her skull screaming to be let out, half an hour debugging and testing it, and ten minutes in the supervisory analyst's office being told that without that extra half-page of redundant information they can't validate the result.

"I could add it back in," she tries.

"Penny, this is the FBI. We don't do sloppy. Criminals do sloppy: that's how they get caught."

Wow. Make one lousy mistake (if she could just work out what it was, because she really thought she'd covered her trail) and you never hear the end of it. She goes back to her desk and modifies the script to include all the redundant information and formatting and to run at random intervals every fifteen to nineteen minutes during working hours— Actually, no, that would be sloppy, and the FBI doesn't do sloppy. She wouldn't want it to send an email while she's on a bathroom break: better tie it to her keyboard activity.

By lunch time she's done herself out of a job, so she figures she'll explore a bit: get to know how these cases work so when they give her something real to do she can hit the ground running. But when she digs deeper she frowns. This can't be right. Why would the FBI care about—? No, no, no: this is just the Bonsai Kittens all over again.

She documents it quickly but super non-sloppily and emails it to the supervisory analyst. In response he calls her back into his office and reminds her that no-one told her to do that.

"Yes, sir, but it's a good thing I did, isn't it? Before we embarrass ourselves and ruin this kid's—"

"Look, if you're right—"

"I am right."

"Then the agents investigating the case will work that out for themselves."

"I know that, sir, I'm just saving them some time."

"Save them some time by running those traceroutes," he says. On her way out she hears him hitting a single key with finality, and she doesn't think he's forwarding it to the agent in charge.

Day four she keeps investigating each of the cases that pass through her script and it's just depressing to see how many of them are the same: kiddie porn investigations over fanart; hacking investigations over white hats telling companies about security flaws; DMCA investigations over DRM decryption software on Bittorrent that's been readily available public knowledge for four and a half years. And the supervisory analyst doesn't want to hear a word. All she can do is modify her script to send its reports in the priority order she tells it, and slow it down as much as he'll let her get away with. It's only stalling, she knows. But maybe in those few hours she's bought, the agents investigating will have got caught up in a real case.

Day five she slows the script down below, it turns out, what the supervisory analyst will let her get away with.

Week two goes no better. At least, she figures, the more time she spends in the supervisory analyst's office, the less time she's spending contributing to the persecution of innocent people.

Week three he figures that out too.

And every day, working on these clunky fragile Windows systems, she spends all day pining for her own laptop. And every night she goes home, sits in front of it, and just... can't bring herself to open it. She's betrayed it. She feels dirty. She sits and stares at it until hunger or her bladder or the need for sleep forces her to leave it there again.

She supposes it's better than prison.

*

Week four the burning question gets too much for her. How _did_ Thomson and Reuters track her down? She's not supposed to have access to any case files, let alone her own, but she's a hacker. She gets access.

And is confused. All the evidence — the off-site servers, everything — is listed under the date they came for her. Before that, nothing. They had her "Happy fun meow meow" signature and knew everything the Black Queen had done. But "Penelope Garcia" was only one of a dozen suspects, and that dozen was based on little more than _demographics_.

So how did they get the search warrant? Even under the PATRIOT Act the feds need _some_ kind of BS to—

There's no record of any search warrant.

Penelope's definitely not supposed to impersonate a federal agent, but she's a hacker and she is going to get to the bottom of this. She sets up a profile in the internal directory and creates a mailbox and sends an email.

> To: harvey.reuters@fbi.gov  
>  From: john.dyson@fbi.gov  
>  Subject: Review of case #284092
> 
> Dear Agent Reuters,
> 
> In review of the abovesaid casefile, I find no record of any search warrant being served on the suspect. Please forward with any associated files for our records.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> SSA John E Dyson (Office of Professional Responsibility)

Four minutes later she has a reply:

> To: john.dyson@fbi.gov  
>  From: harvey.reuters@fbi.gov  
>  Subject: Re: Review of case #284092
> 
> Dear Agent Dyson,
> 
> No search warrant required or obtained in this case as subject consented to Agent Thomson and I entering the premises and accessing her laptop. Subject further made a full confession and agreed to employment as technical analyst in lieu of charges. Therefore am not attaching any of the non-existent files requested. Hope this clarifies everything that confused you.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> SA Harvey Reuters (Cyber Division, San Francisco)

She reads it three times, thinking: But they _showed_ her a—

Folded piece of paper.

But they _said_ —

Going to let us in and give us your password?

And she—

She—

She hacks into Reuters' mailbox and deletes the emails from his Sent and Trash folders respectively. Then she deletes John E Dyson's mailbox and his profile and scours the logs for every last trace of her activity. And then she goes to the bathroom and throws up.

The supervisory analyst hates her by now, but even he doesn't look twice when she calls out sick.

On the way home she stops at a bar and orders, in rapid succession, one each of every pretty cocktail they have on their extensive menu. She wakes up at home on her couch. There's a tall glass of water on her table, and next to it her car keys and a note in an unfamiliar woman's hand reading, "Take a taxi next time." She thinks she remembers brown hair, but thinking makes her beautiful head hurt so she drinks the water and calls in sick again.

When the hangover wears off she takes stock. Her apartment, car, wallet, and magnificent body all seem to be intact. Even her credit card account hasn't been touched, beyond the sizeable dent left by... Wow, that was a lot of cocktails.

There are some really nice people in the world, she concludes.

And then there are scumbags like Agent Reuters.

*

_No wonder she prefers the fantasy: the story where she was caught fair and square, recruited by a real hero to do the work of the Forces of Good, in league with Agent Sweet Cheeks. But fantasies end. Reality keeps going, eight hours a day, five days a week, forever._

*

Week five, she plots a devastating computer virus. Unleash it on Agent Reuters' home and work computers; destroy his life and all his evil ways. She just needs to make sure no-one can possibly trace it back to her.

Except while she's working on that she comes across a photo of his partner. Not Thomson who at least never pretended not to be a jerk; his life partner who looks sweet and happy and in love. And then she comes across some cases he's working on where the targets are actual malware-spreading, credit card-harvesting, possibly human-trafficking villains.

Revenge is one thing. Collateral damage is another. She's not going to go as far as gaining any kind of respect for the wadface, but she does reluctantly scrap Plan A.

*

Week six, Penelope applies for every internal vacancy nationwide and dyes her hair blonde because it's a lot more interview-friendly than her other favourite colours.

Weeks seven and eight, every internal vacancy nationwide rejects her without even looking at her hair.

It's not that surprising. Her résumé _sucks_. No matter how she dresses it up, it boils down to:

> **Experience**  
>  February 2004 - present: Technical Analyst, Cyber Division, DC Office  
>  January 1996 - February 2004: FBI's Most Wanted Cybercriminal Mastermind  
>  September 1995 - January 1996: Computer Science student, CalTech
> 
> **Skills**
> 
>   * Conducting analysis of harmless but technically criminal cyberactivities
>   * Hacking into sensitive computer systems belonging to cosmetic companies, payday lenders, and federal law enforcement agencies
>   * Letting complete strangers into home while under the influence of sleep deprivation and/or alcohol.
> 


And she's brought her work up to a standard that keeps the supervisory analyst off her back, but over half of that is because he's given up on her. She's still hovering around C- level. A job panel's going to be looking for B+, if not A+. Which she could do. She could do that. It'd just mean becoming the boot stamping on all those human faces.

She can't do that.

Sending out résumé after résumé gets kind of soul-destroying. If she's going to get rejected anyway she might as well have fun doing it. So she plays with fonts and colours and paper and iambic pentameter.

For the job in the BAU, which they've posted so near to their application closing time that she spends half an hour looking for the bug in her web-to-email scraper, she digs out her last piece of pink homemade stationery paper and writes in royal blue ink:

> Dear Agent Hotchner,
> 
> With a thirty-hour deadline you must be in a rush, so I'll be brief. I have eight years' experience in accessing and using a vast range of systems in ways they were never intended to be accessed and used. The FBI may have discovered my Kryptonite but none has ever challenged my computer fu. Hire me and I'll be the Ziggy to your Sam. As long as your cause is noble and just I'll not only do your every bidding, I'll code algorithms to do it before you can bid it — and then I'll do things you've never imagined in your wildest dreams. 
> 
> Yours splendiferously,
> 
> Penelope Garcia

She doesn't have a pink homemade envelope so she makes do with an ordinary white one, sealed with red wax. Next morning she'll drop it in to the mailbox at reception on the way up to her cubby hole in the machine that is Cyber. It's a shame though: it looks like it would have been an amazing job.

*

One of many downsides to life in an open-plan office is that you can't get away from the gossip, and don't anybody tell her that men don't gossip. Usually Penelope keeps her headphones on, but Portishead suddenly isn't doing it for her. She ejects it and flicks through her CD wallet for something to better suit today's mood. Ah-hah: her hand-ripped _Court Jester_ soundtrack. Fun, acts of derring-do, and shameless copyright infringement in the middle of the Cyber Division. It's perfect.

She inserts it and is about to hit _play_ when she hears the magic word: _BAU_. She nearly looks, but catches herself, and finds a window to type in while she pretends not to listen.

"Mike says they've already got a hundred applications."

"What, don't they know they'll be working for Agent Hotshot?"

"Not for long, eh? He's been unit chief almost a month, must be due for a promotion pretty soon."

"Only took him three weeks to get rid of Sandy _and_ his replacement."

"Yeah, Mike says he's got a rod up his asterisk the size of a flagpole: _no_ sense of humour."

"I heard he doesn't tell you to jump, he asks why you haven't jumped yet."

"I heard— Speaking of bosses," he interrupts himself as the supervisory analyst comes back in.

"Yeah, thanks for bringing those files over."

Penelope hits play on Danny Kaye while she tries not to hyperventilate. Why is she hyperventilating anyway? It's just one more rejection she knew she was going to be getting anyway. It's not like the job would have actually used her skills and challenged her and let her help people and make a real difference to the world and oh god what has she done?

It's okay, she tells herself. She can do this. Applications don't close until five and she's got plenty of older versions of her résumé on a USB drive. She's got time if she can just get her pink stationery back.

Reception passes her to the mailroom, who pass her to HR, who pass her to someone called Agent Jareau, who answers with an absent, "Jennifer Jareau, Behavioural Analysis Unit."

"Oh," she says, and chokes silently before rallying. No-one's outfoxing _this_ foxy lady. "I sent a letter this morning — um, actually more like an application — anyway I just realised I made a mistake and I was wondering if I could just..."

Still typing at whatever she's been typing at since picking up the phone, Jareau asks, "You want to withdraw your application?"

"No! Ma'am. God, no, I definitely still want to apply, I just..."

"I wouldn't worry about a typo," she says, the reassuring _there, there_ of a busy mother with other things on her mind.

"It's less a typo and more a really bad life choice."

There's a pause. For a moment Penelope wonders if Jareau's forgotten she's even there, but then she comes back with a curious, "Is this Penelope Garcia?"

"Urgh," she manages.

"I'm sorry, I took him all this morning's mail half an hour ago—"

"Maybe he hasn't got through it all yet," she says hopefully.

"He's a fast reader," Jareau says. "...And I put it at the top." While Penelope chokes back another gurgle, she lowers her voice confidentially. "Listen, obviously I don't know anything about interviews yet, but I do know he's planning to email out all the notifications by six tonight."

"But applications close at five."

"Yeah, but things are a bit busy here at the moment." Her tone's so dry Penelope can't be sure she's joking. "So do your best to relax and get through the day, okay? Good luck," she concludes, and hangs up.

*

Penelope doesn't relax in the slightest. She's realising more and more how much she wants this job, and not just to get out of the current hell-hole. She wants to work somewhere she can actually help people. None of this petty rules-lawyering garbage, enforcing bad laws made by politicians who want to look like they're tough on terrorism but don't understand how the internet actually works.

She wants to do something about _real_ crime. Villains full of villainy, as Danny Kaye sings, and knights full of chivalry. She wants to feel like she's one of the good guys again. No: she wants to _be_ one of the good guys.

The more she thinks about it, the more she wants it, and she's already blown it by applying for it with mild sexual innuendo on pink paper to a humourless career agent who eats technical analysts for breakfast.

*

She stays late. She never stays late, so this gets her a lot of funny looks as all her colleagues filter out, but at least no-one asks her any questions. That was another thing Scumbag Agent Reuters lied about: she never did make any friends here. Though admittedly she's never really tried.

She pretends to work, and listens to her CD, and checks her email compulsively even though it's only five twenty-three.

( _No butcher, no baker, no candlestick maker,_  
 _and me with the look of a fine undertaker —_  
 _impressed her..._  
 _as a jester?_ )

Her phone rings. At first she doesn't register it over the climax of _I made a fool of myself!_ When she does she pulls her headphones off and blinks at it. No-one phones a lowly peon in the Cyber Division even during business hours. Why would they call at five twenty-four?

It keeps ringing. It must be a wrong number, she decides, and picks it up. "Greetings, gentlebeing, you've reached the Oracle of All Knowledge, how may I direct your call?"

A man says, "Penelope Garcia, I presume?"

Oh, frell, she thinks blankly, and squeaks, "Yes, sir?"

"This is Agent Hotchner. Can you come for an interview tomorrow at ten?"

"T-tomorrow, sir?" she stutters, and grabs a quick breath. "At ten. Right. Sir. Yes, sir, absolutely."

"Good. I look forward to meeting you."

And he's gone, and it's still five twenty-four, and she's sitting with her mouth open and only the phone still in her hand to reassure her that she probably didn't just imagine that.

*

She goes home and stares into her wardrobe in despair. It's a story of two halves: the clothes she's comfortable wearing, and the clothes that are _appropriate_. She tries on a suit and grimaces at herself in the mirror. She looks like she's trying to look professional and failing miserably. She tries another, just as bad.

She pauses to make herself dinner and dessert, then comes back to it. She tries on every suit in the wardrobe, then starts on her own clothes, and— Suddenly she can breathe again. They _fit_ , and not just because they don't ride up and force her to perform the Picard Manoeuvre every five minutes. They make her feel like Penelope Garcia, hacker extraordinaire and serious contender for the BAU technical analyst position.

Albeit a tragically black-clad version of herself. Come to think of it, she's been kind of a gloom-meister for the last couple of months. Years, actually. Maybe it's time for a change. Put some colour in her life.

She pulls down some emerald green curtains and gets out her sewing machine and makes herself a jacket and skirt to the pattern of an old black thing that she's just decided she's never going to wear again. She lines them with the purple satin from an old sheet, and turns a strand of the beads hanging in the doorway to her boudoir into a necklace and earrings. She paints her fingernails purple, then finishes the bottle on a pair of shoes, then ransacks her cruelty-free cosmetics for the finishing touches.

No, wait: the finishing touch is to take her hair out of this godawful french knot and put it up in two beribboned pigtails instead.

Perfect.

It's well past four am. She collapses happily on her bed and smiles up at the ceiling. It's plain white: she needs to do something with that. And she should start up knitting again. And theatre. She used to love theatre. Why did she stop doing it? It doesn't matter, she's going to find a club and start again, and get a kitten, and llamas, and a duck, and...

*

The phone wakes her. Oh God, she thinks, stumbling back out to her tote bag to find it. What time is it? At least she's wearing her glasses this time. She finds it — sees with relief that it's still seven twenty-two — and answers with the brisk "Hello?" she should have used yesterday.

"Agent Hotchner," he says as briefly. "Something's come up. I'm going to need you here at quarter to eight instead."

"Tonight, sir?"

"This morning."

She blinks, and double-checks on the microwave clock. "That's... in twenty minutes." The guys weren't kidding about him telling people to jump — and she doesn't care. She wants this job. "I'll be right there, sir," she says decisively and, throwing her phone back in her tote bag, dashes to the bathroom to brush her teeth and spray on some deodorant. She looks at herself in the mirror and despairs. How is it possible for one woman to look simultaneously so fabulous and so wildly inappropriate for an interview at the FBI? But she can't do anything about that, she has to _go_.

*

She takes a suit and her makeup bag with her in case a wormhole appears on I-95 and gifts her with a spare five minutes at the other end. It doesn't.

The woman waiting for her at HR blinks at her like she's just brought Technicolor to Pleasantville, and looks around at the clock as if debating whether she can get her to change in the next forty-seven seconds. Deciding not, she shakes her head and ushers Penelope to a meeting room, all glass and steel. "This is Technical Analyst Garcia," she says in studiedly neutral tones, and sits next to the two agents already on the other side of the conference table. They're all wearing very federal-looking suits.

One of the men, until her entrance burying his head in a sheaf of papers, does a classic double-take. The other has just set a laptop to one side and has a more stoic expression on his face. He looks, hand to God, like Captain von Trapp, and she's wearing playclothes made out of curtains, and it was never so hard for Penelope to have confidence in Penelope. She swallows and says determinedly, "Good morning, sirs."

"Have a seat," says Captain von Trapp, and it's no surprise to recognise Agent Hotchner's voice. He doesn't pause for her to answer, let alone to sit and deposit her tote bag by her feet. "This is Agent Cummins, and you've met Agent Daley," who didn't actually introduce herself, but whatever. "I've got a plane to catch shortly so we'll get right to it. I want to be sure you understand this is an extremely high pressure job. It's not nine-to-five and when we need to know something we need to know it now, if not yesterday."

"No problem, sir," she says promptly. "I can work three days straight if the work's interesting and the coffee's flowing."

"And you understand the cases we deal with can be very disturbing."

"Yes, sir, but that's more your job, isn't it, to deal with the icky bits?" He looks like he's waiting for her to answer her own question. "I mean, I'm the computer geek, I just deal with networks and systems and data recovery and things."

"Okay," he says. He passes his laptop across to her. It's a heavy old beast to reach across a large conference table: she has to stretch with both hands to comfortably take its weight. "Look at the image on the desktop and tell me what you see."

Oh, thank goodness. She thought this would be all talking, but she feels so much more comfortable with a keyboard under her hands. "Well, sir," she says, "it's a photo, if that wasn't obvious from the unoriginal filename. Taken on a Panasonic DMC-FZ10 back in November, last modified three nights ago with Adobe Photoshop CS for Windows which accounts for the file bloat. Those were both fresh off the shelf at the end of October, by the way, but you asked me about this file so let's see how it's been edited. By the dimensions I'd say it's been cropped, but not much. Maybe it just needed to be rotated a bit and the edges trimmed off. —No, that can't be right."

"Why do you say that?"

There's a funny expression on his face; she tries not to let it disconcert her. "Well, original photography isn't my métier, sir, but the focus, aperture, shutter speed, that all looks manual to me. Our shutterbug knows their way around a camera, and with an exposure that long they'd have wanted to use a tripod. So the photo would already be straight; there'd be nothing to rotate."

She's getting down now past the EXIF data into the XMP section, which really puts the 'extended' into X. "Oh, I see: they've pasted in another photo. Probably the shapes didn't quite overlap so that's why it needed trimming. Wow, they've put a lot of work into this, changing the colour balance, hues, saturation — I mean, they must have been working on this every day for the last five months. This is a huge amount of dedication for one photo, sir."

He nods, still looking at her like she's something very strange. "And what's your opinion of the photographer's other skills?"

"Other...?" She's already checked the laptop doesn't have Photoshop (though it does have a _lot_ of password protected directories). The file was saved to the desktop earlier this morning and the browser cache traces it to webmail, so for all practical purposes that's a dead end too. She supposes the BAU needs her _no idea_ s to be as prompt as her answers, so she says, "I can't really get that kind of information from the metadata, sir."

In the confused silence that follows, Cummins clears his throat. "Er, I... think Agent Hotchner meant for you to open it with Windows Media Viewer."

She blinks. "Why would I—?" But Agent Hotchner isn't disagreeing. "Wait," she says, "so when you said to look at the image..."

"I meant I wanted you to look at the image," he agrees drily.

"Oh." Right. He'd been talking about the work being disturbing.... She looks warily at the icon on the desktop. But Penelope Garcia is strong. One time, she visited the goatse website and lived to tell the tale. She girds her loins. She double-clicks. "Oh my God," she says and, with one hand over her eyes, fishes desperately in her tote bag. "Why—" Her glowball comes to hand; she gives it a good shake and holds its red and yellow flashes between her and the laptop monitor. "Why would someone _do_ something like that?"

"Miss Garcia," Daley says, looking like she's eating a lemon, "hasn't your supervisor talked with you about your toys causing a distraction in the workplace?"

"Sorry, ma'am," she says quickly. "I'll just—" She hesitates: that _photo_. But Agent Hotchner's lips are compressed too, so she drags one of her command-line consoles over the worst of it and stuffs the ball back in her tote bag. Taking a shaky breath, she looks at the leg sticking out from beneath the console and tries to salvage some remnants of professionalism. "So I— I guess he had a photo of that park and a photo of... Sir, who was she?"

"We're trying to find that out," he says. "So there were two photos. Could the camera data have come from the photo of the park?"

"No, sir. I mean, that's kind of the perfect summer day."

"We don't know where the park is. November's almost summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and it could be any timezone."

"But you wouldn't use that exposure outside, at least not with that aperture. This was— not _dark_ -dark, you'd lose too much detail and those shadows look real, but it wasn't sunlight, either. Sir, if Agent Jareau could give me access to her email — she could watch," she adds hastily: "I just need the headers—"

He's barely moved, but it's a _sudden_ non-movement. "How do you know it came from Agent Jareau's email?"

She falters under his eagle eyes, and rallies. "I— I assumed someone forwarded it to her, sir. I mean, she's your media and communications liaison...."

"I'm the unit chief," he points out in case she's forgotten. "You didn't assume that someone forwarded it to me?"

"But that's not what—" She bites her tongue, because what is she thinking? She should just be meekly agreeing that yes, when someone hands you a laptop the normal thing to do is assume that it's their laptop and their webmail and move on. But it's obviously too late for that now, and the important thing is to find out where this image came from. "I looked inside some of the directories," she admits. "I promise I did not open any documents, I just saw the filenames were obviously Agent Jareau's reports, and one of them was last saved just after she downloaded that photo, and, Agent Hotchner, if I can just trace it back—"

"The police got it from a CD mailed in anonymously. You're right," he says, and he's doing a thing with his eyebrows, all deceptively mild: "I borrowed her laptop after mine wouldn't boot this morning. But you haven't explained how you got the password for that folder."

"I didn't," she says, and quickly amends that to, "I didn't need it. Sir, the problem with using password protection with the built-in system security is that it's Windows, so it's like bolting your door when you live in a house made of straw."

His eyebrows get higher. "So you... huffed and you puffed?"

"Nothing destructive, sir! I just... poked a hole in the back wall and slipped through."

"And right now you are..."

She looks down at her hands still working the keyboard. She guesses she isn't supposed to be multitasking in the middle of a job interview, but there's no point in stopping when she's almost finished anyway. "Fixing it," she says. His steady gaze compels her to add meekly, "...And playing Yahtzee."

There's a dead silence. Cummins is looking faintly horrified and Daley's shaking her head over the open folder of papers in front of her. Agent Hotchner keeps his eyes on her and she's not sure if he's going to point out that three minutes ago Agent Jareau didn't have Yahtzee on her computer, or if he's going to tell her that she's not taking this seriously. But instead, changing the subject entirely and sounding genuinely curious, he asks, "Garcia, what's your favourite brand of vacuum cleaner?"

"The Roomba," she says in confusion. What hacker wouldn't love a machine you can reprogram to dance along to your favourite music? The only downside is it would have made a terrible surname for her fake OPR agent, but Dyson have this cute telescope game on their website so— So— Her brain stutters to a halt. That wasn't a random psychometric question. He knows about SSA John Edgar Dyson. She covered all her tracks, she deleted all the logs, she deleted all the logs of the logs — but he _knows_. "Sir... Agent Hotchner... I can—"

"Thank you, Garcia," he cuts her off. "Agent Daley?"

"Yes," the HR woman says dubiously, referring to her papers. "Well... Miss Garcia, your supervisor notes that your performance over the last few months has been, uh, mixed. Would you care to address that?"

Penelope's been preparing for that really obvious question since the day she started applying for jobs three weeks ago — and suddenly she can't remember a thing of what she'd been going to say. Agent Hotchner _knows_ , and Daley hates her, and whatever Cummins thinks, he's got all the spine of a wet noodle. So really what does any of this matter? She keeps her chin up and swallows hard, a combination that turns out to be pretty painful. "Actually, ma'am, I've got no idea why he'd say my performance has been mixed. I thought it'd been pretty uniformly terrible."

"Uh." She's had a silver corporate pen poised to take notes, but instead she flicks over several pages and starts ticking boxes. "Thank you, Miss Garcia. Cummins?"

Dutifully he reads from his own folder, "Can you tell us about something you've achieved in your current position that you feel particularly proud of?"

There's a slightly awkward silence. Penelope takes a breath to tell them about the script she wrote, like a good interviewee — but what can she say it's actually achieved? Instead she lets out the breath, takes another, and says, "Well, sir, there was this scriptkiddy harvesting email addresses from 419 scammers and hacking into their Yahoo accounts so he could warn everyone in their address books about them. Then he'd bait the scammers into sending him their bank account numbers, and he'd send those along to this other guy who's got contacts who can get the accounts frozen so the scammers can't pay for more mailing lists and modalities and hosts for their fake websites.

"Except _it turns out_ that hacking into email accounts is against the law, even if the owner of the account is a lying liar who defrauds people of their life savings and drives them to suicide. I mean, it's the online equivalent of jaywalking to push an old lady and her poodle out of the way of a fully laden semi, but it's _illegal_ , so I was told to track him down. So what I did was keep putting it at the bottom of my pile. By the time my supervisor gave the job to someone else this kid had warned about twenty-four hundred potential victims and got fifty-nine bank accounts frozen, so I—" Her voice is shaking; she finishes in a rush, "I'm pretty proud of that, sir." 

"I... see..." Cummins says. He looks like a deer in headlights. It doesn't make her feel any better in the slightest.

Incredulously Daley says, "Are you telling us you actively sabotaged an FBI investigation?"

Her throat hurts. Her eyes hurt too, and her glasses are fogging up and this is officially the worst job interview in the history of job interviews but so help her she is _not_ going to—

"I think she's telling us she prioritised her workload," Agent Hotchner says, dry as sandpaper. He stands up with finality. "Have you finished with that laptop?"

She opens her mouth but her voice doesn't work, so she just nods tightly and hurriedly wipes the Yahtzee off the drive. Not all the logs, because what's the point now? but at least she's fixed the hole. She passes the laptop back and feels twice as small and unshielded.

Cummins starts, "Er, I'm going to need to—"

"I'll send it up when I'm back," Agent Hotchner tells him. It goes in a carry-on bag from behind him, then he reaches a hand across the table at Penelope. She stares at it in consternation, and he says, "I appreciate you coming in at such short notice."

"I—" Hastily she wipes her sweaty, trembling palm on her jacket and shakes his hand. It's warm and firm and in any other circumstances might be reassuring instead of distressingly surreal. "Th— Thank you, sir," she manages.

"Make sure you get some breakfast before you go back to work. Would you close the door on your way out?"

She nods and grabs her tote bag and flees. The clock reads seven fifty-two. She forgot to thank Cummins and Daley and it doesn't matter, she doesn't care, they _sucked_ — And it's too late now: she can already hear the low murmur of Agent Hotchner's voice inside. Instead she strides away, clop-clopping in her purple nail-polished shoes, straight down the corridor to an empty bathroom where she can cry all her makeup off.

*

Breakfast stops her shaking, but she still feels like the bottom of a birdcage. When she's finished, she changes into her spare suit and goes up to Cyber wondering why she's even bothering. If they have evidence of her impersonating a federal agent, then dressing in _appropriate_ clothes and turning up for work on time won't keep her out of prison.

At her computer she puts her headphones on. _Life — could not better be!_ Danny Kaye exults. She swaps the CD back out for Portishead and pokes glumly at the top case on her pile.

What's she even doing here? Tomorrow she's going to be wearing orange. Which has something to be said for it, but does she really want to spend her last moments of freedom persecuting innocent people?

She writes a memo. _Recommendation not to pursue investigation_ , she titles it, and loads it with all the reasons and all the evidence for the reasons why they shouldn't waste their time on this guy who's just _playing_. She emails it to the supervisory analyst, then does the same for the next case.

The third case is more of a grey area, so reluctantly she sends on the traceroute. But it's still a jaywalking charge compared to the BAU's line of work—

God, that _photo_. She shoves her glasses off and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes, trying to erase the image in favour of the soothing scroll of metadata.

And then she's swearing and hunting for phone numbers. Agent Hotchner's file has additional security on it and she doesn't have those extra seconds so she calls Agent Jareau first.

"Jennifer—"

"Hi, it's Penelope Garcia and I had an interview with—"

"He's on a case in Philadelphia right now, but I'm sure he'll call you when—"

"Yes, ma'am, but I didn't tell him about the camera serial number. You can call Panasonic—"

"It was stolen from an electronics store at the start of November," she interrupts.

"Oh." Of course they already know. It doesn't take a genius to pull a serial number out of some EXIF data. "I'm sorry—"

"No, Garcia, you've really helped us with the profile. Just hang in there, okay?"

She puts the phone back on the hook and hangs like DOS. That _photo_...

And what she really can't get out of her head is the park: the impossibly clear sky, the family playing frisbee away by the treeline, the lush green grass only ruined by what this creep did to that poor woman. Like he's the Grinch's eviler twin, except instead of Christmas he's determined to ruin summer. Or some idealised vision of summer, like a tampon ad, or a—

Or a stock photo.

Ctrl-alt-delete: she reboots her brain. "Okay, Mary-Lou Who," she mutters, opening up a pile of web searches, "time to do that thing you do." _Summer. Park. Weekend. Frisbee. Sunny. Sun. Grass._ She needs more monitors. She's juggling dozens of sets of search results on seven different stock image websites. She moves onto page two of each of them... page three... And what if she's gone past it too quickly, or it's not here, or—

It's here. Or a preview of it is there, more benignly defigured with a great fat watermark. Which means to get the clean image he had to buy it, which means the company has credit card details, which means— Penelope sends it to email with the company's phone number and jabs _redial_ , and when Agent Jareau answers again she says, "Check your box, baby, cause it's smokin'!"

"...Sorry?"

She sobers abruptly. "I mean, Agent Jareau. Ma'am, please hang up on me if you already have this, but I just found the photo of the park on a stock photo website."

There's a pause, but it's not a click. "He downloaded it?"

"Better: he _bought_ it. He has to have, to get that quality."

"Oh my god."

"I know, right? So that means—"

"We have to call a judge," Agent Jareau says, and hangs up.

She starts a victory twirl in her chair, and stops after a mere 180 degrees: the supervisory agent's standing there with his arms folded. "What was that about?"

"Sir, I was just—"

"No," he interrupts in exasperation. "I don't even want to— Just quit with the extra-curricular activities, stop sending me memos, and do your goddamn job for _one_ goddamn _day_!"

Everyone is staring. _Everyone_. "I—" she starts, and stops, because she's not going to cry twice in one morning — she's _not_ — and anyway he's already walking away.

So instead she whirls back to her monitor, sets her jaw, and closes all her consoles. She works steadily through the rest of her stack of 'cases'. Once she has a few templates for her memos it's just a matter of checking which category each falls in and pulling up the evidence and, as each memo is done, adding it to its casefile where a sub poena or Freedom of Information request will turn it up.

Then she tracks down all the other cases she's worked on in the last two months and does the same for all of them.

She obediently doesn't send them to the supervisory analyst. Instead she waits until they're all finished and sets up a script to email them, one every ten seconds, to his supervisory agent. And when his email box is overflowing, she keeps sending them to his agent in charge, and then to his section chief. And when some automated sanity check eventually boots her off the mail server, she resurrects Agent John E Dyson to send the last batch to the assistant director. And when all the emails are gone, she types up one final message: to Robert S Mueller, subject "I quit", body "You know where I live."

*

She goes home and makes herself a salad for lunch. Then she washes, dries, and puts away all her laundry, because she's not leaving a hamper full of dirty panties for the arresting agents to paw through. She's ready when her doorbell rings. This time, she's decided, she's going to insist on seeing their warrant just for the principle of the thing. She opens the door on the chain.

It's Agent Hotchner.

"I thought you were in Philadelphia," she blurts.

"We were," he agrees, "but then somebody solved our case for us."

"Somebody— I did that, sir?"

He lifts his eyebrows with a nod. "Pretty much. So I'm hoping I can persuade you to withdraw your resignation and work with us on a more official basis."

Apparently two months of Windows is catching, because her brain is doing the Blue Screen of Death. "I—" she tries; and "Wh—?" And then finally she scrabbles up the most plausible explanation, and she realises she is _tired_. Prison, fine, whatever, but she doesn't have the energy to deal with being tricked again. She takes the door off the chain and swings it wide open. "Sir, if you're going to arrest me—"

"For writing memos?" he asks with a shake of his head, "or for reporting a security flaw in the FBI mail server?"

"I kind of took advantage of it a little bit first!"

"And that's going to stop," he says, "and if you've got a problem with the BAU's priorities I expect you to tell me about it."

"But I didn't even hack the mail server so much as the identity provider which regulates access to... sort of everything. It's okay, I can fix it," she adds before he can panic, not that he looks like he's panicking, or even like he'd ever _dream_ of panicking — possibly in fact she's the one panicking, but she _needs to know_ : "but if you didn't know that, then how did you know about Agent Dyson?"

He looks at her: a long level look that reminds her that he's a hotshot FBI agent and she's a hapless criminal who doesn't get to ask questions. She gulps and is about to fold like a baby giraffe when he says, "When I read your résumé I called Agent Reuters. He mentioned getting an email from OPR about your case; it sounds like it was very convincing. In fact when I couldn't find Agent Dyson myself I assumed one of us had just misremembered the name. But your behaviour at the interview suggested an alternative explanation."

"Oh," she says, head whirling. She can kind of follow that, but how would any normal person even get from there to here?

"For what it's worth," he adds, "I don't care what you wear, and I don't care how you decorate your office. As long as you do the job, everything else is a sideshow."

"But HR—"

He shakes his head again. "I've clarified our requirements with them."

Just like that. Like all it takes is writing a line of code and watching the bureaucracy blink away into— _Oh_. "You're a hacker!" she realises. "I mean, obviously you don't hack computers, you—" _Hack people_ probably isn't the metaphor she wants at this point, and she flounders for a moment before realising it's right there in the names. "Like I'm a technical analyst: you're a behavioural analyst."

But it's more than that. It's why people think he's just some hotshot, when she'd bet a dozen servers he's not ambitious in the slightest. He's just _working_. Stand in his way and you might as well be a Windows system password prompt; but do your job and he won't care about your peripherals. Hackers respect competence.

And he's doing that thing with his eyebrows again. She's starting to think it might be a smile. "I'll tell Agent Jareau to expect you in twenty minutes," he says.

*

Four days into the job she's figured out why the last guy didn't make it to three weeks. She's treading water in the deep end and it's definitely not a nine-to-five. She's barely had time to go to the supermarket let alone shop for the complete wardrobe overhaul she so desperately needs, and it turns out the BAU doesn't need a technical analyst so much as it needs a digitisation project. Grep is her bitch but manila folders on endless shelves in the bullpen are a Lovecraftian nightmare.

She's heading back to her office with an armful of files to eyeball when someone calls, "Hey, babygirl!"

She stops dead. There's no chance he means someone else. With Agent "Call me JJ" Jareau in Boston — hacking the ongoing media interest in the case the last unit chief stepped down over — the place is positively swimming in testosterone. So Penelope turns and echoes, "Babygirl?"

"Forgive me," says the offender, super earnest — and, wow: super hunky. Behind him another agent hides a smirk like someone just got pwned, and next to _him_ Agent Hotchner is... Is that the thing with the eyebrows? "I just didn't know the real—"

She might consider playing along with the prank, except four days into the job she still can't stop grinning for more than five seconds at a time. "I've been called worse," she tells him instead. And then she helps them catch another serial killer.

*

_Penelope has this fantasy. But she also has this reality. And she can never decide which one she likes better._


End file.
